1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of separating the cap and base from a plastic bottle as a preliminary step to reprocessing the plastic used to make the body of the bottle.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The plastic bottles or containers used in recent times to package soft-drinks and the like have become popular because of their easy disposability by the consumer. Nevertheless, the plastic used in making the body of the bottle can often be reclaimed and reprocessed for other uses, such as extrusion into fibers.
The body plastic must ultimately be pure to be reprocessed. Accordingly, it must be separated from the other non-plastic parts of the bottle, such as an aluminum cap or paper label, and even from parts of the bottle, such as a friction-fitting base which many such bottles have, made from a different plastic. Various methods of effecting this separation are currently in use, but these all suffer from high cost and complexity or from low speed. One such method involves actually unscrewing the cap and pulling off the base either manually or through automation. The body plastic is then ground and reprocessed. Another method involves grinding the entire bottle and then chemically or physically separating the desired ground body plastic from the ground aluminum of the caps and other ground material of the base. This method is obviously complex and costly.
Therefore, there remains a need for a relatively simple, high-speed, and inexpensive method of separating the parts of a plastic bottle for subsequent reprocessing.